Not too long ago, Apple added the Video Decode Acceleration framework to Mac OS X, allowing developers to get low-level access to hardware H264 acceleration. Adobe was quite thrilled about this, because they claimed this was needed for Flash video to become hardware accelerated on the Mac. This feature's been in beta for a while now, but yesterday they finally released it as part of a regular Flash Player update. Caveat: Apple's support for this framework can be a bit sketchy.

In my opinion, Adobe is too loyal. If I was an exec at Adobe I would have killed all of their products on the Mac platform the day Apple banned Adobe's cross-compiler for Flash on the iPhone. Abusing your competitors is the standard in today's world, but Adobe is one of Apple's largest third-party developers and Apple should view them as a partner rather than a competitor.

Yes, you know, all Adobe's foot dragging over the last 10 years has really helped Apple, right? Adobe's customers using Apple equipment have deserved better.

Adobe wanted cheap development so they did the minimum to get everything running on Mac OS X, except for what wasn't selling well. This hasn't helped their customers one bit. e.g., Photoshop 6 in the Classic environment ran better than the "native" Photoshop 7.

I'm using Photoshop CS3 finally but it's not a good native application, showing CPU usage as though it's polling. Should the loop code from the 1990s still be there?

Yes, you know, all Adobe's foot dragging over the last 10 years has
really helped Apple, right? Adobe's customers using Apple equipment
have deserved better.

Actually, it did. Before the iDevice era, the only compelling reason for most users to use a Mac was Photoshop. While I know it would piss off many hardcore Apple fans from the Mac OS 9 era, I would venture to say that having great color support for apps like Photoshop was the only thing keeping Apple afloat.

Adobe wanted cheap development so they did the minimum to get everything running on Mac OS X, except for what wasn't selling well. This hasn't helped their customers one bit. e.g., Photoshop 6 in the Classic environment ran better than the "native" Photoshop 7.

I'm using Photoshop CS3 finally but it's not a good native application, showing CPU usage as though it's polling. Should the loop code from the 1990s still be there?

During that 10 year period, Apple changed the base of their operating system (OS 9 -> OS X), the display API, swapped entire processor architectures (PPC -> x86), and then pushed for 64-bit support. While I support Apple behind all of these moves, I don't fault Adobe for falling a little behind on the Mac platform. They had to keep the Mac version of the software feature-complete compared to the Windows version AND support all of these transitions. Meanwhile, they only had to support the transition to 64-bit on Windows. It makes more sense to focus on features since that benefits both platforms rather than try to constantly rewrite pieces of the infrastructure to keep up with one platform. That point is further strengthened if you look at the market share of each platform at the time of these transitions.